Stef's Blog - a native London Southlander and unrepentant 'Conspiraloon™' who doesn't trust anyone, not even himself. Sometimes I take pictures. I also enjoy swearing immensely and think much faster than I can type, so each post comes guaranteed to include at last one confusing typo. OK?

Sunday, October 31, 2010

Every self-respecting Conspiraloon has already seen the following clip numerous times but it is so beautifully expressed that I've never really tired of it

It's taken from 'Life is Worth Losing', a HBO Special by George Carlin

And what struck me the last time I watched the clip is the enthusiasm of the audience response to Carlin's routine.

In a handful of minutes Carlin, articulately and passionately, summarises the essence of Our predicament. The crowd clearly loves being told about how it is getting f*cked in the rear end and whoops and cheers every time Carlin pauses for breath

And then?

They all went home

And presumably carried on getting f*cked in the rear end as usual

Which, if you think about it for a moment, is quite peculiar behaviour

'You're getting f*cked!'

'Ha Ha, That's so true. Guffaw Guffaw'

'No really. I mean it!'

'Tee Hee. Got to go home now so that I can get up tomorrow and get f*cked some more. Ho Ho'

And if you think about it for a while longer, it's simple enough to figure out why Carlin, and people like Carlin, were and are allowed to have their little rants

Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Thanks to the spectre of cognitive infiltration, the Conspiraloon™ Alliance has few in the way of heroes it can place faith in in these difficult times. Michael Parenti is, however, one of the handful of serious academics such as Peter Dale Scott, Michael Hudson and Jesse 'The Body' Venturathat the Alliance currently looks upon favourably. That is until if and when they are exposed as being the COINTELPRO scum that they possibly are

Definitely not COINTELPRO vermin, probably

As Michael P. himself said recently

'Democracy isn't about trust ...trust is something you should reserve for close friends and loved ones ...and even then you should check them out once in a while'

Thanks to The Antagonist for pointing me to an mp3 of a speech Parenti made earlier this year at the Understanding Deep Politics conference

Parenti's getting on a bit and he does lose his way momentarily a couple of times in his presentation. But this is Parenti we're talking about and even a Parenti who pauses occasionally to think to himself about what's for dinner tonight and if he should put on a cardigan or not is still a class act

Highlights of the talk include...

A listing of the intellectual alternatives to what is now termed 'Conspiracy Theory. Alternatives such as "Innocence theory", "Somnabulist theory", "coincidence theory", "stupidity theory", "incompetence theory" and the trusty old loon favourite "stochastic theory" (shit happens)

A discussion of how the Few have managed to narrow the range of permitted public political discourse down to a point where any suggestion that the establishment is run by people of deliberate bad faith is designated as being in the same category as Elvis sightings

Identification of what should be a blindingly obvious point that, for some logically inconsistent reason, it's OK to believe that Labour organises to pursue its own self-interest in the best way that it can but to believe that oligrach's do the same is popularly dismissed as insanity. A notion enthusiastically promoted by media owned and controlled by those self-same oligarchs

Parenti also ponders upon the fact that those who consider themselves to be of the Liberal Left have been suckered into being some of the most vigorous supporters of this kind of elite-serving bullshit thinking

Tuesday, October 26, 2010

A few days ago I was engaged in conversation with a non-conspiratorially minded chum who works in UK property sales

Times are definitely a changing as, for the first time, he acknowledge to me that, yes, the UK possibly was headed towards a period of severe economic hardship for the massses. He was, however, confident that the UK government 'has got clever people working behind the scenes who can see what's coming and the government probably has already started spending money on starting up some industries that will help pay us out of the mess the country's in'

My response was that there is absolutely no sign of that whatsoever and that whatever industry we could think of getting into, the Asian economies can think of getting into with a much lower cost base.

Even if they consented to enduring the same standard of living as the Chinese or Indians, the wages of British workers cannot be slashed to be competitive with Chinese or Indian labour because UK property costs are so much higher. Property costs that the British have to meet directly in rent or mortgages and indirectly through the rentierelement concealed within the price of essential goods and services

However, as I explained to my chum, I have seen copious evidence that the British, and other Western, establishments are preparing for the possiblity of some kind of economic collapse. They haven't invested much in the way of productive manufacturing industry but they have spent shed loads on tooling-up their police forces

But that, my chum argued, was necessary because of the threat of terrorism...

Evidently, he's still in need of a little more conspirasizing

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I've been pulled up a couple of times in this blog for suggesting that British police have become more like para-militaries in recent years. The people who've pulled me up have have referred to the pitched battles, complete with cavalry, during the miners strike and the treatment meted out to people like Blair Peach and Stephen Waldorf as being evidence that the police have always been a bit 'tasty' when it comes to dealing with people who get in their way

And, yes, these commentators have a point but, with all respect, have you taken a look at the British police recently...

Even former senior coppers and yes, though I still can't quite believe it, Max 'Have you read my book about how great the SS were' Hastings have recently written articles suggesting that having machine-gun toting police who can execute people with impunity is probably not the way for supposedly civilised societies to go...

But even these (presumably) principled voices against the militarisation of our police compromise their argument by agreeing that, because of the threat of terrorism, there is a place for some British policemen to be kitted out with the kind of weaponry and mentality that wouldn't be out of place in a 1970s junta, but only sometimes

Now, to me, it's plain as day that the Terror threat is being at least bigged-up, and possibly at least partially instigated, by the numerous interest groups that benefit from a society collectively crapping its pants

But that's actually a moot point

Even if I believed that the Terror threat was 100% genuine and as really, really scary as our Overlords keep telling us it is, we should still reject the surveillence state and militarised police on the time-honoured bases that those who surrender liberty for a little temporary safety really do deserve neither, that freedom has a price and that if we change our society in response to terrorism the terrorists have achieved their objectives

You will hear none of these arguments being promoted by British politicians, journalists or officially sanctioned (low) pressure groups like Liberty

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The gun fashionably displayed by the group of licenced potential killers in this photo is a variant of the iconic Heckler & Koch MP5...

The MP5 can chuck out bullets at rates of up to 500-600 rounds a minute. It's black, it's scary looking and it can kill a lot of people very quickly. It's the kind of high-quality weapon that gives serious gun nuts a roaring chubby just thinking about it.

MP5s, and a smattering of the higher velocity H&K G36, are now a common sight in London in the hands of Metropolitan police officers. If you're ever at one of London's airports take a look up sometime and you'll see police officers at the mezzanine levels strutting around with their MP5s, presumably ready to cut loose from elevated positions of fire at the drop of a hat.

If you think about it for a moment that doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Even if the quality of domestic terrorist was to take a quantum leap up from the kind of sad losers who make bombs out of flour and set fire to their underpants to the kind of terrorists who actually have access to guns, are the police really going to open fire with machine guns in crowded airport terminals? And, even if so, why do those armed police have to be there right in front of our fucking faces all the time?

The answer, I fear, is the same reason why the government sent light tanks to Heathrow before the invasion of Iraq. That weaponry is not there to scare potential (and, remember, allegedly suicidal) terrorists. It's there to scare us

...suspects were planning to copy the 2008 attacks in the Indian city of Mumbai*, where 10 gunmen went on a three-day rampage, killing 166 people and injuring more than 300, the sources said.

In response police armed response units are being given more powerful weapons.

Our correspondent said the UK authorities had been planning for such an attack ever since Mumbai* happened.

"David Cameron has taken a personal interest in the problem ever since his first threat assessment given to him when he took office in May.

"Now police armed response units are getting their firepower and their stocks of ammunition increased to deal with multiple terrorists armed with automatic weapons," he said.

More powerful than MP5s and G36s?!

What the fuck are they planning to start dishing out?

A few days ago I posted this clip as being a possible model for the introductory titles to any new TV series about the Metropolitan Police...

It was an attempt at weak humour

And it's weaker by the day

* = You remember the Mumbai attack, that's the one that included operatives with connections with US intelligence that the Indians are getting pissy about. A back-story that has been lavishly covered by the British State Broadcasting Company. Or, there again, maybe not.And don't forget to read the hard-hitting, insightful and totally objective analysis from the SBC's totally unspooky Frank Gardner to the right of the article about UK police being armed with gatling guns or whatever the fuck it is they're getting. Frank's analyses are worth the State Propaganda Tax on their own

Friday, October 22, 2010

You've got to love the timing of the second placard being raised siliently into view...

...and a couple of gold stars to the cameraman who didn't warn Robinson that his fatuous twaddle, fatuous twadlle that Robinson's viewers would forget as soon as he stopped talking, was being interrupted by something real

This clip reminded me of a point I've tried to communicate to fellow Loons and Bloggers who still, deep down, nurse the idea that there are 'Good' mainstream journalists out there who, given the right material and circumstances, will help change the world

No, no there are not

There are no dishevelled, semi-alcholic rogues with a passion for a scoop begging their editors for 'just another 24 hours'. Just like there is no Death Star sporting a critical design flaw that makes it vulnerable to a single shot from a lone virtuous warrior

These are myths brought to you by the people who fabricate the news and manufacture Death Stars

Thursday, October 21, 2010

For many years the UK Gold Standard for 'chilling' imagery was this picture of Myra Hindley...

Not being old enough to recollect the Moors Murders the only thing I found immediately chilling about that photo was the choice of haircut and unflattering lighting

For the generations that did remember the murders, however, this was an extremely emotive photo and became legendary as a cheap, Pavlovian way to boost newspaper sales on a slow day, through the simple technique of fabricating the flimsiest of pretexts to stick the Hindley portrait somewhere on the front page

And, after I learned a little about the Moors Murders, I could concede that, yes, you could convince yourself that there was something intrinsically evil about Hindley's expression if you were so inclined

But, to be honest, the image itself really was no more intrinsically 'chilling' than any other crap portrait taken of a woman with a crap haircut in the mid 1960s

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Which is my roundabout way of introducing the much more contemporary issue of what is the State and its supportive media whores to do when there is fuck all in the way of video evidence that ties the alleged 7/7 bombers into the actual bombings?

Imagine that you've secured a mound of totally innocuous video of the alleged 7/7 bombers going about theirdaily business, no different to the mound of innocuous footage you could gather on any other citizen of these over-surveilled isles but, thanks to a series of incredibly unlikely mishaps, you have no actual, for want of a more respectful phrase, money shots

How do you attempt to convince Jane and Joe Public that the footage you are going to try and sell to them as being hard evidence of terroristic wrong-doing is not actually banal and irrelevant?

Various dodges have been tried - showing undated footage not taken on 7/7 at the same time as a voice-over talks about 7/7 is one, referring to 'iconic images' of ecstatic bombers hugging each other that don't actually exist has been another, but none have been so heavily used as the old classic...

Describe any old irrelevant toss as being 'chilling'

Don't quite get what I'm on about? Do a couple of Google searches for terms like '7/7 Bombers Chilling' or '7/7 Chilling Photographs', read a few of the results and see if any of the material described as 'chilling' is anything but irrelevant and/ or innocuous

as I'm sure you'll appreciate, there are plenty of other examples out there

Make no mistake, whenever you see or hear the word 'chilling' used in a news story, the person behind that story thinks that you, your mum, all your family, your friends, your neighbours, everyone you've ever cared for in this life, are all thick as pig shit and are stupid enough to be sold any old codswallop, given the right subliminal prompts

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edit: and in the context of BS news stories attempting to weave evidence of murderous intent out of the irrelevant and mundane, the first half of this Daily Mail article...

Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Given that the J7 team are doing an excellent job of analysing the material generated by the 7/7 Inquest over at their dedicated blog J7: 7/7 Inquests Blog, I do not intend to duplicate their effort by posting my own version of their work.

I may, however, make occasional posts on issues that I wish to amplify or offer a slightly different take on

The latest post on the J7 Inquests Blog discusses the evidence that there may been more than four people in the group of alleged bombers that visited London on 7/7, and the off-hand treatment of that evidence by 7/7 Inquest officials...

A commentator underneath one of my recent posts seemed to think that because I and others have issues with the absence of relevant CCTV material that maybe we are under the impression that the four alleged bombers didn't visit London on 7/7.

Nope

There could just as easily have been five, or six, or zero, or, yes, even four bombers who travelled down to London by train on the morning of 7/7

I haven't the faintest idea

That's my problem with the Official Narrative

The only alternative theory I am promoting is that I think the Official 7/7 Narrative is currently unsupported by evidence of a quality that would secure a criminal conviction 'beyond reasonable doubt'

and that's putting it mildly

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Additional 7/7 Inquest analyses that people have made me aware of since my last post include...

Thanks to the commentator who pointed me to Nick Kollerstrom's posting on the 7/7 Inquest. Dr Nick has admittedly assisted with some useful research on 7/7, particularly in establishing that the original version of the Official 7/7 Narrative had the alleged bombers travelling to London on a train that didn't run. An all the more impressive performance from the Official Narrative given that it also alluded to witnesses on that non-existent train

I do, however, have a major problem with the quality of Dr Nick's judgment. Not least the fact that he decided to diversify into a spot of Jewish holocaust revisionism where he put his name to an article which implied that Auschwitz was some kind of Nazi Butlins; complete with swimming pool, water polo and picture postcards. An article that the mainstream and controlled alternative media got righteously steamed up about just before Dr Nick offered himself up for selectively-edited sacrifice by the BBC's Conspiracy Files

Out of respect to the useful work that he has done, I'll link to Dr Nick's current posting on the 7/7 Inquest but I won't be including his site on any permanent link listings, as he has demonstrated that he is more than capable of pulling off feats of outstanding foolishness at the drop of a hat

Personally speaking, I may, on occasions, attempt to use crude humour or a superficially flippant style when writing about issues such as 7/7 but I never forget that this is a serious business and that 56 people died violent deaths on 7/7. This is not some abstract intellectual entertainment and to even hope to achieve some kind of positive result I believe that we sceptics have to educate ourselves to exercise good judgment and common sense

Keelan's just put out a podcast containing a reasoned critique of the 7/7 Inquest (the 7/7 material starts 20 minutes in). The podcast, like 7/7 The Big Picture, is a little rough around the edges but nevertheless contains good information and reasoning. It is clear that Keelan is working hard towards developing an evidence-based analytical approach that tries to avoid the flights of fancy that have been attributed to Conspiraloons in the past

Tom Secker, the producer of another indepedent 7/7 Documentary, Seeds of Deconstruction is another researcher who seems to me to be trying to exercise critical judgment in his handling of the 7/7 material. Tom's take on the 7/7 Inquest thus far can be found over at his blog Howard Beale's News Hour

By their forensic nature, the articles I've linked to above are quite long and detailed. As such they illustrate one of the dilemmas faced by independent researchers who are sceptical of government narratives

If those researchers perform painstaking, meticulous research they are accused of being pedantic, train-spotter types who waste their lives teasing out the kind of tiny inconsistancies that even a completely honest narrative would contain

If those researchers don't perform painstaking, meticulous research they are then subject to the kind of bullshit typified by this comment from an anonymous bell-end underneath a link to J7 on the Indymedia site...

"18.10.2010 14:42Most of your claims around 77 were around pulling apart the original and sparse CCTV released but now there has been a wealth of it been released your claims are meaningless. All these theories trickle down from Alex Jones, David Icke and others who make a lot of money from books, DVDs and lecture tours. You accuse people of being sheep for following 'mainstream media' but then you get your information from the likes of Infowars a site that tells its readers they need guns and gold to protect themselves, and they happen to sell it! Sorry Troofers, 911 was an outside job, 77 was an outside job. PS Just because you put the word 'truth' on your websites and in the name of your groups doesn't mean it is true."

J7 doesn't plug guns and gold. I don't plug guns and gold. None of us rely on Jones or Icke as primary sources. There is no wealth of CCTV, and the kind of person who posts mendacious nonsense like this is either a natural fucking idiot or a professional fucking idiot

And never, not once, in years of posting hundreds of sceptical articles have I had to resort to misrepresenting the views of people I disagree with. I may be off the mark with some of the views I hold but if that ever turns out to be the case I would have been honestly wrong and I have not lied to others, or myself.

And if I ever found myself behaving in that way I hope I'd be honest enough to ask myself what kind of Truth it is I pretend to be defending through the application of misrepresentation and deceit

Saturday, October 16, 2010

Twenty or thirty years ago, proceedings such as the ongoing 7/7 Inquest would have been subject to critical scrutiny by at least some journalists and politicians. Not necessarily because those journalists and politicians suspected a high-level State conspiracy but simply because that's what they were supposedly employed to do, to hold the State to account

In most other dimensions and universes this headline would be considered bollocks

Today, literally not a single paid journalist or politician is exercising any critical scrutiny over the 7/7 Inquest. An inquest into an event which has been used to justify a national commitment to overseas wars and torture, as well as the erosion of domestic civil liberties

Literally dozens of Terror Bastards tooling up for a campaign of bloody mayhem - or some people buying fish fingers. It's difficult to be sure

Over this last weekend a handful of, for want of a better adjective, ordinary people have been working through and analysing transcripts and other material generated by the 7/7 Inquest. These researchers are not being paid for their efforts and they are, in fact, reviled and accused of being mentally ill by the professional whores who should be doing that workWhat a screwed up state of affairs we find ourselves in. We live in a time where the range of public discourse permitted to us by our Establishment has been so narrowed that the simple act of being sceptical of government narratives is now routinely dismissed as mental illness

Fuck them

Fuck them all

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The folks at J7 have recently started a blog dedicated to their analysis of the material generated by the 7/7 Inquest

Which points out that the people running and taking part in the 7/7 Inquest are doing a stand-up job of attributing blame and apportioning guilt to the four alleged 7/7 bombers

...even though a) the Inquest has barely started, and b) the people running and taking part in the 7/7 Inquest have acknowledged that it is not the job of an inquest to attribute blame or apportion guilt anyway

Which ponders the question of how the Metropolitan Police could have been searching CCTV footage from Luton Station for signs of the alleged bombers one day before the Met had actually identified who the alleged bombers were and where they'd boarded their train. Maybe the Met is in on the secret of time travel?

We Conspiranauts are well familiar with the long-established scientific principle that CCTV cameras spontaneously break-down whenever pointed at alleged terrorists carrying out their attacks or policemen shooting innocent people in the back of the head. However, there is still an almost comedic quality to the list of excuses, obsfucation and plain old bullshit that is being offered up by the Met in lieu of actual CCTV coverage from 7/7.

It's all vaguely reminiscent of Monty Python's Cheese Shop sketch - only the Met has got fuck all video evidence rather than cheese

At this rate of foul-ups the 7/7 Inquest is going to tie itself into terminal knots within a few weeks, regardless of however compliant the mainstream media continue to be. Presumably this will have been anticipated and corrective measures will be employed. Such a state of affairs was reached in the weeks after 7/7 when even the mainstream press started to question the suicide bomber narrative. At which point one, then two, 'confession' videos fortuitously emerged on the web and all was right in Official Narrative Land once again

And that, aside from some comments posted on this blog, is about it as far as I'm aware of. I do miss Lord Patel's contributions, and Lord Patel, at times like this. If anyone passing through this blog knows of any other decent research (and I think it's fairly clear what I mean by decent) being carried out on the 7/7 Inquest material please do share

"The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you've got it made. Thank you, thank you. Now excuse me I've got an inquest to run..."

Years ago, shortly after 9/11, I was arguing with a work colleague about the blatant inconsistancies in the Official Narrative of that particular atrocity.

The miraculous fire-proof passports were high on my list of bullshit, as was the suggestion that the hijackers had been cramming 767 flight manuals in the airport car park on the morning of 9/11. I also had big issues with the story that at least some of alleged Muslim fanatics had got lagered up in the Pink Pony titty bar the night before their 'martyrdom operation'

My colleague explained to me in the most patronising tone he could muster...

'But what you don't understand is that these Al Qaeda operatives are trained to blend in seamlessly into Western Culture'

Now, as it happens, he was the kind of seedy old sod who did frequent titty bars on business trips and probably does consider them to be the epitome of Western Culture, but that's by the by

My response to my colleague was

'Is there anything those men could have done that would have disproved that they were Al Qaeda terrorists?'

His answer was that they shouldn't have destroyed the Twin Towers

Basically, he already knew that they were guilty (because he had been told by the media that they were), and the details of anything they did before the attacks, however banal or contradictory to the notion that they were religious fanatics, was to be interpreted in that light

Once you adopt that kind of mindset absolutely anything a person you've identified as a criminal does will be damning proof of their guilt

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Critical thinking clearly isn't as popular as it once was but, even so, it should still be fairly clear that theories which are phrased in a way that they can't ever be disproved, even if they are wrong, are not very useful theories at all

They are, however, the basis of much top quality comedy - including many a Marx Brothers routine, huge chunks of Catch-22 and the scene in Life of Brian where Brian denies that he's the Christ and is then informed that 'Only the True Messiah denies his divinity'

That which makes for top quality comedy does not, however, make for top quality inquests...

13 There is no evidence at all that we have seen to14 suggest that the bombers were duped in some way so that15 they did not know that they were going to die or, even16 more absurdly, that they did not know that they were17 carrying explosives at all. Indeed, such claims run18 entirely contrary to all the evidence that I have19 summarised so far.20 It is right to say that the bombers were21 surprisingly effective, it would seem, in concealing22 their intentions from those around them. Tanweer played23 cricket in the evening before putting the terrible plot24 into effect and seemed more concerned, according to his25 family, by the loss of his mobile phone.

You could write a longish essay exploring how many different flavours of intellectual dishonesty feature in the above extract from the 7/7 Inquest proceedings

The conclusion that there is no evidence that the alleged bombers were duped or otherwise unknowing suicide bombers is based on the assumption that they were entirely knowing. One piece of evidence that Tanweer was not a knowing, intentional suicide bomber (his playing cricket) is dressed up as evidence of the alleged 'concealing their intentions from those around them'. But this presumes that they were knowing, intentional suicide bombers, so the conclusion that there's no evidence of them being dupes or patsies is an implicit premise in analysing the very evidence that they were dupes or patsies.

When your conclusion is actually an implicit or explicit premise in your argument then your argument is circular. It also engages a certain degree of doublethink - evidence they weren’t guilty isn’t evidence they weren’t guilty, because we know they were guilty, and hence there’s no evidence they weren’t guilty.

This is a bloody pantomime. It not only presumes a desired conclusion, but seeks to refute 'conspiracy theories' by merely repeating the very thing the 'conspiracy theories' are questioning. It's like they've let the BBC's Conspiracy Files crew loose to carry out the inquests.".

My late uncle served in the London Ambulance Service for 32 years. During that time he had developed a healthy respect for the Metropolitan Police. He had very little time for conspiracy theories, was willing to give the security forces the benefit of the doubt, and always invoked cock-up and the natural human desire to cover-up cock ups as the probable explanations for the kind of issues that we Conspiraloons get wound up about

Earlier in the Summer, and before he shuffled off this mortal coil, I was having one of my usual, mostly good-natured, slanging matches with my uncle about exploding trains and innocent people being shot in the back of the head in London when he said something along the lines of...

'OK, you weren't completely off the mark with that Brazilian thing but you can't seriously deny those four Muslim nutcases set those bombs off in London that day!?'

As it happens, my uncle was on duty driving a support vehicle on 7/7 and ended up in Tavistock Place. I know he saw a fair few casualties from the bus explosion. So, I said to him

'According to the Government, those bombs were supposed to be made from home-made explosives and home-made explosives burn, not blast. How many of the people you saw getting off that bus had any burn injuries?'

...that the alleged 7/7 bombers allegedly put together with loving care with the military grade explosives they made in the bath out of chapati flour and hair care products, only to leave in the back of their car on the day of their attack

From what I've read of the current 7/7 Inquest-themed pantomime it would seem that the establishment is sticking with the DIY explosives story. How well that's going to hold up as the Mock Inquest proceeds (not very well so far) remains to be seen

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